Changing the world, one museum at a time

What is the future of Jewish museums? Our evolving social, technological and economic landscape is impacting and challenging all museums’ identities and survival. At the same time, recent tragic events around the globe remind us that political, social and technological forces also impact and challenge Jewish identity, practice and survival. How can Jewish museum staff, volunteers and people of all cultural and religious backgrounds respond and lead their organizations and peoples into the future? These questions framed this year’s gathering […]

By Jenna Hebert As my plane alighted into San Diego the afternoon of February 19, I gazed from the small oval window. I was excited to be back in a place so familiar to me and to see the beautiful architecture of the park I had come to love. The museums and cultural activities in San Diego and Balboa Park had become extensions of my classrooms during my time as an undergraduate at Point Loma Nazarene University, and I was […]

Editor’s note: University of San Francisco is proud to announce that it has become a lead sponsor of the Western Museums Association professional conference in San Jose, California, to take place in late October 2015. The post below was written by faculty member Marjorie Schwarzer last fall when she attended the Fall 2014 conference in Las Vegas with several USF museum studies graduate students. ********* In 1972, architects Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown wrote their controversial manifesto […]

Editor’s note: This post is adapted from a press release written by Glori Simmons, director of USF’s Thacher Gallery, about Hiraeth, an exhibition that opens today at the Gallery. Hiraeth is a Welsh word meaning homesick or a longing for a place that does not exists. From March 9 to April 21, 2015, The Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco and the 3.9 Art Collective will collaborate for an exhibition that adopts that concept to explore the exodus […]

by Monica Villavicencio Sometimes following your calling means venturing so far outside your comfort zone that you’ll ache with homesickness. That was the choice for museum studies student Jordan Dresser MA ’15. But choosing a purpose-fueled future over the serenity of home was the only choice that made sense. Dresser is from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, a 3,500-square-mile-expanse of mountains and prairie. The reservation is home to two tribes, the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone, and it’s […]

In Museums in China: Power, Politics and Identities (Routledge, 2013), Tracy Lu discusses how modern museums have played a significant role in the formation of the modern Chinese state. Thousands of public museums in China attract and serve locals and tourists. More are on the way. According to Daisy Yiyou Wang, curator at the Peabody Essex Museum and former Smithsonian researcher, as of 2012, a new public museum broke ground every day in China. In comparison, at the height of its building […]

by Stephanie Brown Surgery that reconstructs a human face damaged by war. Ceramic works that join ancient traditions with modern practices. The relationship between aesthetic perception and the healing arts. What do these ideas and practices have in common? At first glance, almost nothing—but, for members of the International Visual Literacy Association, it’s all about the glance. More than glancing, it’s about deep looking. The IVLA defines visual literacy as “the ability to derive meaning from images of everything that […]

As its founding officers prepared to graduate last semester, MSGA elected its new officers for the year 2015. Our president is Lydia Marouf. Lydia spent her winter break in her hometown of Ramallah, Palestine visiting with family and researching museums there. Vice President is Oregonian Hilary Dawn who returned from winter break early to help project manage and install the Reformations exhibition in Thacher Gallery. Secretary Rheilly Llanos is an educator and former public school teacher and volleyball coach who hails […]